


The Woman in the Cell

by isthemachinesinging



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-05
Updated: 2013-04-05
Packaged: 2017-12-07 13:01:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/748783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isthemachinesinging/pseuds/isthemachinesinging
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An innocent soul in Hell.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Woman in the Cell

The woman in the cell has been there for a very long time.

Or she thinks it has been a long time; time runs together here. She may have been here past the end of all things. She may have only just gotten here. Sometimes she thinks there is a trick, and time runs backwards, until there never was a time that she wasn’t here, in this cell, until her life outside is nothing but a trick of silence.

The silence and the darkness and the cold are everything. She isn’t sure anymore if there has ever been anything else; she thinks this must have been everything, since the beginning. Time flows and eddies around her. Everything outside is nothing but a vague dream.

Sometimes the dream feels near, and she thinks she is passing close to the time she came here, her body a little ship on the eddies of time. She feels for her body, finds only charred bone; brittle, stinking charcoal. Bone is knitted over with muscle, with flesh and skin, and she feels fleeting relief until it melts away again. It is a hallucination. It is the only reality. She is nothing but bone and thought, dreaming of flesh that never existed.

A man came to her cell, sometimes, in the beginning, or perhaps it was near the end. She remembered him then, though she does not now. He stared at her with yellow eyes, and she stared back, refusing to drop her gaze. She knew his name, then, and she was proud, and she stared into his eyes. _You did not win_. She remembers thinking this, although mostly now she does not remember who she spoke to, or what it means. She has only a vague impression of twin glowing circles of yellow. Yellow means something, but she’s not sure what it is anymore.

The man with yellow eyes brought a visitor, once. He did not have strange eyes but he stared at her and cried and said “Mary,” as if the word was the world, as if it should have been her world. She stared at him, too, and he stared back, and she did not know him. And the man with the yellow eyes laughed at them, and she wondered at the word “Mary”, but it refused to tie itself to her, to the man without strange eyes. She is not Mary. She is not. She is not at all. She is bone dreaming of flesh, silence dreaming of sound. She is a soul dreaming of a woman.

In an endless dream a man with white eyes comes to her. She does not know him but she stares at him, stares right into his eyes, and thinks of the other man—was there ever another man? Or was it this one all the time, and she imagined the yellow eyes? She has a vague impression, but she does not know what yellow is anymore. Perhaps this is yellow. Perhaps this is the same man. Perhaps there is no man. But she looks into his eyes and tells him _you will not win._

He laughs and he laughs and the next time he comes he brings another man, another man whose eyes are not strange, but she thinks he is not the same man as the yellow eyed man brought to her. The man cries and reaches out to her as if he knows her and tells the man with white eyes _it isn’t right, she shouldn’t be here_. He is wrong. She is here. She has always been here. There is nowhere else she has ever been. There is nothing else she has ever been. She wants to comfort the crying man, and she tries to move, but she remains fixed in place. She understands. She does not exist. She is nothing but hallucination dreaming of thought. And the man with white eyes laughs and takes away the man who cries and turns back to her and calls to her and then it is nothing. She is nothing.

She is nothing and nowhere and is not. There is not a woman anymore; there is only vague thought, curled in a cell in silence and darkness. The cell is an abyss and the cell is eternity and the cell is the universe. And she is not there. She is charred bone and fear and once she thinks maybe she was something else, that she was somewhere else, but she cannot remember what it might have been. She cannot remember. She cannot think anymore. She cannot. She is not anymore. She is a dream. She has never been anything else.

Time runs together here, and the shadow that sometimes dreams it was a soul that dreams it was a woman thinks it runs backwards. Sometimes it thinks there is no time; it cannot remember anything except this single endless moment. Time is another dream. The silence and the darkness are also dreams; the shadow that dreams it was a soul knows that this is true. There is no silence, and there is no darkness, and there is no cell. There is nothing. There has never been anything. There is only the abyss, the emptiness, the dream of being…something.

The shadow forgets what the something is that it dreams it once was. It forgets about the soul, and it forgets about the woman. It forgets about the man with white eyes and it forgets about the man with yellow eyes. It forgets about the man who called her “Mary” and it forgets about the man who cried. It forgets the silence and it forgets the darkness and it forgets the cell. It _is_ and it exists without time and that is all it remembers; it cannot remember that there was ever anything else to remember.

The shadow in the cell had been there for a very long time. Once it thought of itself as a soul, and before that it thought of itself as a woman. Now it is a shadow, but it does not call itself shadow because to name itself would be to exist and it knows, all it knows, is that it does not exist. There is silence and darkness and there is no time but there is eternity. And after an eternity and an eternity there is something new.

There is a man. And he does not have strange eyes and he is not led by a man with strange eyes. He is alone, and he looks into the cell with the shadow and the shadow thinks that once it dreamed of other things, that it once was other things. And the man does not see the shadow but it sees what the shadow once dreamed it was; the man sees the soul and he sees the woman. He calls out to her, to the woman, and the shadow hears. It begins to remember. It remembers the dream of the soul, and it remembers the soul that dreamed of a woman. It thinks that the dreams were not dreams. The shadow was the soul was the woman. The man cries out to her again, an incantation like a name and she thinks perhaps it was her name. Did she have a name? If she was real, she must have a name.

_I’m here to take you home_ , the man says. And the cell is opened, and the shadow remembering the soul remembering the woman knows. It is real. The cell is real and the silence is real and the darkness is real. Time is real again and it moves and flows and pushes it forward, and the shadow collides into the soul into the woman. And she is. She is knitted together, she is flesh and she is soul and she is bone. She is the shadow and she is the soul and she is the woman. She is. She is real.

She is free.


End file.
